The Library of Ice Page 9
The mission might not have approved, but Kleinschmidt was dedicated to pursuing his linguistic studies. As someone who put great store by speech, it is ironic that his biographer, a near-contemporary named Otto Rosing, interprets Kleinschmidt’s character using graphology. If handwriting can demonstrate psychological traits, Rosing writes, then ‘Kleinschmidt’s fist shows his fine character and great sense of order’. Kleinschmidt’s manuscripts are meticulous, but they were never easy to read. Despite being extremely nearsighted, he often chose to write in microscript. He was frugal with paper, which would have been scarce in a study so far from Copenhagen. He wrote using a magnifying glass, and a magnifying glass is essential to read his work.
Kleinschmidt was not alone in his fascination with Greenlandic. The first missionaries to arrive in Greenland encountered a tradition of oral literature: a past preserved not on paper but in people’s memories, and passed on through song and storytelling. For the evangelists of Kleinschmidt’s parents’ generation, and later for colonial governors, it was not only necessary to learn the language, but also to decide how its sounds should be represented on paper. Men who had come bearing Bibles soon began compiling dictionaries. The settlers used the Roman alphabet they already knew to transcribe Greenlandic, but its letters could not encompass the sounds of the Eskaleut language family. Kleinschmidt devised a new system of letterforms far better suited to its character. This visionary orthography, published in 1851 as Grammatik der Grönländischen Sprache (‘Grammar of the Greenlandic Language’), introduced the special character kra (K‘/K), and the long vowels and stuttered consonants were indicated by means of diacritics. (Although these were clearly improvements, the system continued to be debated until the 1973 language reform, when kra was replaced by q.)
Linguistics was not the only field in which Kleinschmidt strove for greater knowledge than was sanctioned. He sketched and surveyed the west coast of Greenland in drawings that are now being used to assess how the landscape has changed. For many years he observed and recorded a phenomenon almost as ephemeral as speech – the aurora borealis. The Danish meteorological institute curtly informed him that this wasn’t necessary, that the aurora held no interest for them because so little was known about it. Yet Kleinschmidt continued to take notes three times a day, from 1865 until his death in 1886, earnestly forming his own shorthand composed of letters and numbers to record the location, orientation, shape, movement and colour of the entrancing lights in the sky.
Fire is a danger to books, but so too is water. And papers that have been subjected to both elements – first burning, then suffering the jets from fire hoses – rarely survive. Those well-intentioned people who race to put out a fire with water often succeed in damaging all they have saved. Water can stain or weaken paper, and mould will start to grow on the organic matter within damp paper in a few days. Paper made before the mid-nineteenth century can absorb large amounts of water. In a manual for librarians bluntly titled Disaster Preparedness, Constance Brooks, chief of the Preservation Department at Stanford University Libraries, lists supplies that every library should have on hand for the conservation of documents. She includes ‘deep-freeze facilities’, into which wet documents can be placed to prevent the spread of mould. At the National Library in Nuuk, these facilities were provided by the immediate environment.
The Danish conservators feared that the inks might feather or migrate as the ice around Kleinschmidt’s manuscripts melted. The manuscripts remained frozen for two years while James Flink and Henrik Høyer debated the problem and conducted experiments on modern paper samples. Finally, the documents were transferred to the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby, a suburb half-an-hour’s drive from Copenhagen, and placed in a freeze-dry chamber in the Food Technology Lab. In freeze-drying, ice is converted to vapour without passing through a liquid state; the vapour is then drawn off. The process is used to prepare many everyday consumables from instant coffee to dehydrated strawberries, and the team working on Kleinschmidt’s manuscripts wanted to see whether it might preserve the water-damaged archives. Flink and Høyer pried apart the stacks of frozen documents to allow the manuscripts to dry more quickly. (It was possible to do this without causing damage to the manuscripts because paper folders had been interleaved through the file.) The little bundles of paper, 2–3 centimetres thick, were then placed on pre-cooled, porous trays and sealed in the vacuum chamber. After a day or two, the doors were opened again. Flink and Høyer found that each page separated easily from the next, and the ink had not run.
Flink and Høyer’s success story has become a case study for conservators. They preserved some of the earliest written examples of Greenlandic for posterity. However, the prospect of future readers for these documents was beginning to look doubtful. A few decades later, in 2009, the Greenlandic dialects studied by Kleinschmidt were added to UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. The words that had proved so resistant to written form were beginning to disappear.
I am curious to find out how much of Kleinschmidt’s archive was preserved by the ice. Where are the papers now? I consult the catalogue of the Royal Library in Copenhagen (known as The Black Diamond) and find eight reels on microfilm ‘after orig. in Nuuk, Greenland’s National Library’. The website of the National Library in Nuuk has more on these originals: ‘The main materials are now in the Groenlandica collection. These collections are irreplaceable and are kept carefully and protected from fire.’ Whether this is a direct reference to the events of 1968 is unclear. The website continues: ‘Groenlandica has made 2014 action year for the digitization of this collection.’ There’s only a week left of 2014 when I read this, so I look eagerly to see what is available online. There are a few letters to Kleinschmidt, but none from him. When I download the letters I find that most have been scanned at a resolution too low to be legible.
The online trail has petered out. It’s a familiar feeling. My time in Upernavik had taught me that in the Arctic problems which seemed insurmountable from a distance were often easily resolved on the ground. It is time to return to Greenland.
The National Library is now housed at the University of Greenland campus, halfway between the city and its airport. My taxi approaches an architectural masterpiece that has been designed to look like the rocky landscape: a far cry from the gable-roofed building by the harbour that housed Greenland’s first library. The glass lobby offers a view south towards the sea. Instead of ice, the water reflects a cloudless sky. On land too, everything that was concealed under the ice is revealed to me now.
The traveller who arrives in Greenland in August has already missed most events of the summer: the celebrations for Midsummer (and National) Day, and national hero Knud Rasmussen’s birthday on 7 June. The days are still long and light, but an indigo gloom descends around midnight. For an hour at least, streetlamps shed their rays like the heads of cotton grass that line the dusty gutters. Most students are on vacation, and the library interior is quiet, save for the soft thud of books being re-shelved by an intern. When I explain my research to Charlotte Andersen, the director, she whispers, ‘Ah, it’s such a shame you didn’t come last year.’ In September, James Flink made the journey from Denmark to Greenland with his daughter Sofia in order to look at the important documents he’d worked on once more before he died.
Charlotte brings me a file on the conservation of Kleinschmidt’s documents. I find within it printouts of emails arranging Flink’s recent visit, and a series of Kodachrome transparencies depicting the manuscripts in Flink’s cupboard at the Technical University in Lyngby. I hold each tiny plastic frame up to the light and examine the image. At last, a sighting of the elusive documents. It’s impossible to get these copied so I will have to record what’s there. I scribble descriptions down in my notebook, trying to be accurate: the binding of the books, the height of the stacks of paper. But when I come to the end of the slides, I realize I have only captured the manuscripts’ external appearance.
There is only one ima
ge of Kleinschmidt’s handwriting in the files. It is a photographed page of manuscript in immaculate copperplate which lists the rulers of Egypt. Its ordered approach to history reminds me of the Stream of Time. The pharaohs’ names are transliterated into Greenlandic. The venerable names have been preserved on paper, whereas their bodies were covered in natron powder and wrapped in linen. How much does either relic convey of the living person? The elaborate Egyptian rituals of mummification remind me of the unnamed Inuit, now on display in the National Museum a few miles away. The 500-year-old grave was discovered at Qilakitsoq in 1972 by brothers out hunting for ptarmigan. Inside, the remains of six women and two children had been mummified by cold temperatures, not by a sacred ritual. The frozen water had sublimated from their bodies naturally by the same technique Flink had used in his laboratory to preserve the manuscripts.
As I leave the library I notice a box of de-accessioned books for sale at just a few kroner each. I buy an illustrated children’s primer, Vi Læse Dansk (‘Learn to read Danish’) from 1971, aimed at Greenlandic children. Then I spot a sober Greenlandic grammar from 1952 that uses Kleinschmidt’s orthography, including the hard K‘/k and obsolete diacritics. I read the easier of the two books on the yellow bus which winds its way through new housing developments towards my hostel. I’m intrigued to find that alongside the accounts of seal hunting, shopping and snow, there’s a story about a fire. The house of Anton, the tall stranger from abroad, is in flames. There’s smoke coming out of the door and out of the windows. Where is Anton? ‘Anton, Anton!’ call the children. ‘Your house is on fire!’ But where is Anton? In the illustration, smoke billows alarmingly around a man seated, nose deep in a book. He has not noticed anything amiss. ‘Anton is reading and reading.’
III
HUNTERS
THE SOUND OF A KNIFE
Ilulissat Kunstmuseum, Greenland
The British Museum, London
Memory does this: lets the things appear small, compresses them. Land of the sailor.
Walter Benjamin, Ms. 863v
I
The director of Ilulissat Kunstmuseum, Ole Gamst-Pedersen, makes coffee and serves it with biscuits he announces with a flourish as ‘Danish’. I help myself to a shortbread finger and tuck my feet up under me on the banquette while we discuss the work I plan to do during my residency. I travelled up the coast from Nuuk this morning, and the pills I took for the flight have made me sleepy.
‘The museum is open to the public for three hours every afternoon,’ Ole says. ‘One to four. I’ll be here then, of course, but the rest of the day you have the place to yourself.’
I will also have it to myself on Fridays and Saturdays, when the museum is closed all day. (This seems to preclude rather a lot of visitors. Sometimes in the afternoons as I look out the window I meet other faces peering in, travellers whose brief sojourn in town doesn’t overlap with opening hours.) And it’s mine all through the night too. I will sleep in a spartan antechamber off one of the main galleries, furnished with a narrow bed, a desk and a sealskin rug.
Ole leaves on the dot of four to feed his dogs, and a sensor on the door gives a little ping as his tall form passes it. I’m glad I will be able to hear if someone is entering the museum: with its maze of interconnecting rooms, it would be easy to not notice an unexpected guest. The building was once the home of the Danish governor, and there are signs of its history as the centre of colonial power. While it is small by comparison with the galleries in former industrial warehouses back in the UK, the museum feels spacious, and is a conspicuous landmark among the smaller homes and shipping containers on this outcrop near the harbour. (Shipping containers are a ubiquitous form of storage in the Arctic, as if even now people are determined to be ready to pack up and sail away.) Outside the building, two enormous flagpoles reach almost as high as the fish factory cooling towers.
Left alone in the museum, I feel as if I have inherited a stately home complete with its art collection. I wonder if I will have a favourite work by the time I leave. Many of the paintings are on a large scale, with gilded frames adding to their grandeur, but there are also intriguing sketches of ships and sounds and dog sleds. Most of the works in the museum are by the Danish artist Emanuel A. Petersen. As a youth, Petersen struggled to forge a career for himself as a painter, resisting the disapproval of his clergyman father. Since he could not afford to study fine art, he took a practical approach to his training, first apprenticing himself to a house painter and subsequently working for the Royal Porcelain Factory in Copenhagen, painting marine scenes onto vases and other luxury tableware. In 1921 he tried to secure a passage on a freighter to the Mediterranean but there were no vessels due to sail south, so he jumped aboard a ship bound for West Greenland instead.
By this twist of fate – not unlike that which had first sent me to Upernavik – Petersen became a ‘Greenland Painter’ (Grønlandsmaler), one of a group of Danish artists who travelled to Greenland during the nineteenth century and used its landscape and people as motifs in their paintings. His first journey north was followed by another, four years later, when he spent a year here in Ilulissat, sketching the waters of Disko Bay which surround the town, and the icebergs that drift across them. By this time photography had already superseded drawing and painting as a form of documenting landscape, but there was still a strong market for scenes of remote fjords and icebergs illuminated by the setting sun. A few tarnished medals in the museum testify to the worldly success that these paintings brought Petersen, an artist now almost forgotten in Denmark.
Picturesque icebergs are such a feature of this town that it is named for them: ‘Ilulissat’ means ‘icebergs’ in Greenlandic. Around a tenth of all the icebergs that the Greenland ice cap produces calve from the great glacier, Sermeq Kujalleq, into a nearby fjord. As tabular bergs the size of sports pitches shunt out to sea, they split along internal rifts into craggier shapes, scattering innumerable football-sized ‘bergy bits’ (that truly is the technical term) which wash up at the old harbour. There were obvious similarities between the painted views inside the museum, and those I could see through its windows, even if the old skin kayaks riding the waves had been replaced by polyethylene ones, and there were no shipping containers to be seen in Petersen’s colourful settlements. It wasn’t just these everyday artefacts that had changed. Petersen sketched in Greenland, but many of his paintings were completed back in his studio in Denmark. As he was relatively unfamiliar with the places he was depicting, and unable to go back to the original subjects, his canvases cannot be taken as a faithful record of the landscapes he observed. Yet I felt there was a more significant difference between what I saw on canvas and what I saw out on my walks, which I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The relationship of his paintings to the topography beyond the museum walls began to puzzle me.
I lived with Petersen’s work for two weeks. I passed the paintings in the twilight as I went to bed, and during the long mornings before Ole unlocked the front door and the sensor made its merry electric ping, I looked at them closely, with the kind of hunger that only the absence of any other entertainment could generate. I returned to them after my own encounters with the landscape. In Ilulissat, I delighted in discovering a freedom that had been restricted on Upernavik. It was one thing to slither around a small icy island in the dark, something else entirely to set off into the hills in my orange windproof jacket, knowing that I could continue walking until the ice sheet brought me to a halt. My retinas were scorched not by ice but by miles and hours and days of sunlit rock, the scale of which induced a kind of vertigo. I felt intrepid, but this was no unexplored wilderness. Come winter the land would be crossed by dog-sled trails.
One day, after improvising a route among the loose boulders lining the gorge and then striding out across exposed stages of gneiss, I arrived back at Holms Bakke, the barren ridge that overlooks the icefjord a mile or so south of Ilulissat. It’s the kind of view tourists are supposed to take photographs of. I get out my camera. First,
I tried focusing the lens on the icebergs clustered in the fjord, then on the mountains disappearing in a haze towards the horizon. A raven flew past, a tiny dark speck whose swift flight brought the magnitude of the ice into perspective. Back in the museum, I pause before Petersen’s painting of the same scene, to see how he achieved the illusion of distance on a flat canvas. He only used white paint where the sun strikes the facet of the berg directly; the shadows are an intoxicating blend of blues steeped in blue. Like the melting ice itself, the painting asks the viewer to prefer shadow to sun. The cloudless sky is the least dramatic part of the image, guaranteed not to draw the eye away from the ice, and it’s only by chance that I notice a couple of puncture marks in the canvas just below the edge of the gilded frame. I can tell they come from drawing pins because around one is a ghostly circle where the pinhead has been pressed down. It looks like the halo that appears around the sun when light is refracted through ice crystals in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Petersen’s lack of training meant that his work in oils was sometimes flawed: he failed to apply primer to his canvases, for example. (Primer is a layer of white gesso, which stops paints sinking into the canvas, allowing them to keep their colour longer.) After noticing the pinpricks, I begin to examine the effect of time and the environment on his other works. Nearly all these paintings once had to make the journey north from his Danish studio, and traces of their travels can be found on them, or signs of neglect remain from their time in private collections. The rough waters in the icefjord through which a kayaker makes his way look even rougher now the lively brushwork that represents the waves has cracked and is threatening to peel away from the canvas. Vertical cracks run the length of a colossal portrait of the schooner Heimdal, showing that the canvas has been rolled up; concentric lines in the sky above the eagle’s nest look for all the world like the hairline cracks children create when they stamp on brittle, icy puddles. In Sea, Ice and Mountains, the fields of blue are interrupted at the horizon by a tiny three-cornered gash where the canvas shows through, which may have been made by another painting’s frame piercing it from behind. A snow scene is dimpled where a sharp-cornered object has bashed against it from the front. In one painting, the space in an ice floe left by a piece of flaking paint has been coloured in using a blue felt-tip pen. These incremental physical changes in the paintwork seem, even more than Petersen’s original marks, to express the character of ice. Step back, and the forms resolve into an ideal landscape, step in close, and you see the damage. Although the museum is sensitive to the demands of artworks in extreme conditions at 69 degrees north, and they won’t deteriorate further, correcting these earlier signs of wear understandably lies beyond the budget.